The film chronicles the ordeal of Irene Trent (Stanwyck), who is unhappily married to a blind, pathologically possessive millionaire inventor, Howard Trent (Rorke). Howard and Irene’s palatial mansion is packed with an endless assortment of clocks, all in perfect synchronization, and Howard tape records all conversations in the house for later reference, hoping to catch Irene plotting an illicit liaison.

Irene thus lives in a constant state of dread, wondering how far Howard’s jealousy will go. Yet despite Howard’s continual accusations of infidelity, Irene remains faithful to Howard, but has nightly recurrent dreams of a fantasy lover as a sort of escape from the reality of her tormented existence. She is also attracted to Howard’s personal attorney, Barry Moreland (Taylor), the only visitor allowed in the house.

Howard spends most of his time working in his laboratory on a variety of projects, the nature of which he refuses to divulge to anyone. As tensions mount, Irene feels trapped in a loveless, lonely relationship. But suddenly, everything changes: one night, Howard is killed by an explosion in his laboratory, and Irene inherits the house and Howard’s entire fortune.

The laboratory itself, a charred wreck, is secured from the rest of the house by a deadbolt so that no one may enter. Irene, after consulting with Barry Moreland, decides to move out of the house, into the back room apartment of a small beauty shop she owns, ‘Irene’s,’ which she operated before she met and married Howard. Almost immediately, the dreams of a fantasy love begin again, with increasing intensity, until they take the form of an “ideal” man—known only as ‘The Dream’ (Bochner).

Night after night, ‘The Dream’ appears before Irene, whisking her away to a bizarre wedding ceremony in which she ‘marries’ ‘The Dream’ in front of a group of wax figure witnesses, or engages in a harmless tryst over champagne in a deserted hotel. Irene begins to doubt her sanity and unaccountably finds herself wishing to return to the nightmarish house she shared with Howard. But the reality behind Irene’s dreams is a secret that The Night Walker withholds until the very end; a bizarre and complex tale of murder, betrayal, and deception.

Modestly budgeted, and shot entirely at Universal City, the film was a change of pace for Castle, who usually relied on gimmicks to sell his films, such as ‘Emergo’ for House on Haunted Hill, or ‘Percepto’ for The Tingler. This time, Castle relied on Bloch’s reputation as the author of the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is based, as well as the re-teaming of Stanwyck and Taylor, who had been married from 1939 to 1951, as being sufficient to publicize the film.

Nevertheless, the film was not a financial success. The Night Walker marked the end of Castle’s most influential period as a director, although he would go on to produce and/or direct a number of additional films for Universal, and later, Paramount Pictures – most notably producing Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in 1968.”

This has been available only on VHS since 1993; it’s really nice to see this sharp, atmospheric film get a legitimate DVD release as part of the TCM/Universal “Selects” series, on a double bill with director Harvey Hart’s lost supernatural thriller Dark Intruder, another film that has never been available on DVD, with a strong link to the works of the writer H.P. Lovecraft. The DVD was released with almost no publicity on December 7, 2015, and I just stumbled over it by accident – I hope people will take the time to watch this intriguing and impressive film, a lost gem that really deserves greater attention.

John Boorman’s second feature film is also one of his best; Point Blank (1967) follows the mysterious hoodlum Walker (Lee Marvin, in one of his finest performances), who has been double crossed during a robbery by his erstwhile partner Mal Reese (John Vernon) at the deserted Alcatraz prison, now used by the mob for a money drop. Reese shoots Walker at “point blank” range and leaves him for dead, but against all odds, Walker manages to swim from the island and make it to shore, where he uneasily joins forces with the equally slippery Yost (Keenan Wynn) to bring Reese down, and recover his share of the proceeds of the robbery ($93,000 — the figure is continually reiterated throughout the film).

Walker is Orpheus returned from the land of the dead; when he gets his first lead on Reese from Yost, he confronts his wife, Lynne (Sharon Acker), who left him for Reese, but she’s catatonic, and useless to him; during their brief reunion Walker says not a word, while Lynne rambles on incoherently about the double cross, how she “just went with it,” and why she no longer wants to live. Shortly after this, Lynne dies from an overdose of sleeping pills.

Moving on, Walker enlists Chris (Angie Dickinson), who has her own scores to settle with Reese, and with her help moves up through the organization, eliminating one mob underling after another in pursuit of his ill-gotten gains. People fall out of windows, others are cut down by gunfire, and yet Walker still can’t collect the cash. Nobody has any cash anymore; everything is done with bank transfers. Throughout the film, Walker makes it clear that all he really wants is his $93,000 — if he can just get that, he’ll abandon his vendetta against Reese and the mob he runs with.

Lee Marvin returns from the dead in Point Blank

But no one believes this; they can’t understand why such a relatively trifling sum would matter to a man who has literally come back from the dead. Yet, that’s all Walker really wants, and he won’t stop until he gets it — if he can –

Immaculately shot in a cold, hard, metallic style, edited as if by Alain Resnais at the height of his New Wave powers, and featuring a roster of effectively hardboiled performances from Marvin, Dickinson, Vernon, and perhaps most of all, the ever-reliable Lloyd Bochner, as a mob boss who coolly sizes up the situation and blames Reese for the whole affair — “you’re trouble, Reese. I’ve always said so. Wherever you are, trouble finds you out” — Point Blank is another film that you should see immediately, if you haven’t already; more than forty years after it was made, the film retains its power, intensity, and its cutting social commentary.

Lloyd Bochner in Point Blank

The world of Point Blank is empty, hard and instantly disposable, and the film is classic, corrupt, and more relevant then ever in the equally uncertain years of the early 21st century. Point Blank is a neon hell from which there is no escape, and no resolution — a world where you can’t win. You have no power, no agency, and no hope — nothing works. That’s what Point Blank is all about.

“[Lee Marvin] was over in London doing The Dirty Dozen at the time and had a lot of time on his hands, so we met many times and I got to learn a great deal about him, and I could see that he’d been in WW II, had been shot, had killed people and had this compulsion to play out this violence. That’s why his on-screen violence was so compelling, because he’d been there. It was coming from a real place.

So in many ways, Point Blank became a film about him. In the end, we met a final time and he said “I’ll do this picture under one condition.” And he took the script, and threw it out the window!

[So he] committed to [the film on the basis of] a conversation. You could never imagine that happening today. So I came over here, to L.A., with Alex Jacobs, another friend of mine, and worked with Lee throughout the process. Lee called a meeting with MGM, with the head of the studio. [Marvin had] just won the Best Actor Oscar (for Cat Ballou) and was very hot. Lee said, “I have script approval, right?” They said “Yes, Lee, of course.” “I have cast approval?” “Yes, Lee, you do.” “I defer these approvals to John.” And he turned around and walked out!

So I had this kind of extraordinary power on my first film in Hollywood, which Lee knew I’d need, because the film was quite daring and avant-garde for its time [. . .] When I’d finished the picture, I showed it to the studio heads. Margaret Booth was the supervising film editor and head of post production at MGM then. She was Louis Mayer’s film editor, had cut Gone With the Wind, had been there for years, and years. She was greatly feared because she re-cut everything.

So the lights went up with all the executives mumbling about re-shoots and re-cutting, and she looked up and said “You touch a frame of this movie over my dead body!” And that was it!

I saw Point Blank recently for the first time in years at the New York Film Festival. And what struck me was the amount of silence on the film’s soundtrack. I think what we’re seeing in films today is a proliferation of soundtracks dominating the visuals. They’re leading the film and the audience is getting used to the idea of sound effects, music and dialogue forcing the picture and they rely on that, rather than the visuals leading the attack.

[When I was making the film] I shot what was, at that time, the lowest ratio of film in MGM’s history. I think I shot 70,000 feet or something [for the whole film]. I was determined to just shoot the shots I was going to use, so there would be nothing anybody could do about it.”

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. All comments by Dixon on this blog are his own opinions.

In The National News

Wheeler Winston Dixon has been quoted by Fast Company, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, The Christian Science Monitor, US News and World Report, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, The PBS Newshour, USA Today and other national media outlets on digital cinema, film and related topics - see the UNL newsroom at http://news.unl.edu/news-releases/1/ for more details.

UNL Film Studies Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon discusses the 2015 Ridley Scott film "The Martian," and the accuracy (and often inaccuracy) of science-fiction films at predicting real advancements in science and technology. […]